ZPL preview in the designer
When you are designing labels for printing out on ZPL compatible printers, then you might have some doubts as to how it actually looks when the result is printed out on a physical printer.
One solution could be to print out a lot on your physical printer to verify various changes. Another solution is to trust the result view or even the PDF preview.
If you have a Zebra printer, which is ZPL compatible, that is not used in production, then you can actually preview via this physical printer directly in the InterformNG2 designer.
The preview is 100% accurate so the preview will look exactly as the final printed result. The preview process is (behind the scenes): InterformNG2 merge the input file with the template into a ZPL datastream. That is sent to the printer, which is asked to generate an image to show the rendered result and that image is shown directly in the designer.
The prerequisites
Before you can do the ZPL preview you need to configure at least one ZPL printer as a preview printer. You should avoid using a production printer for this as printing might be disrupted while you do the preview.
The preview printers are defined in the printers setting of InterformNG2 and here you add a new printer and select the rightmost tab: Use for preview as below:
Here you give the preview printer a name, select ZPL for the mime type and the resolution that match the resolution of the physical printer head.
InterformNG2 has to be able to reach the printer directly so you need to enter the IP-address or host name of the printer.
A hint for the printer settings: The preview result is limited by the printer settings for the labels, that are currently loaded in the printer. That means, that if you are currently designing a label, which is larger than the labels, that are currently loaded (assuming that the printer is correctly calibrated), then the printer will only display (and print) a part of the label, that you are designing. If you however configure the preview printer in InterformNG2 as if it has a lower resolution than it actually has, then you can preview larger labels than the labels currently loaded in the printer.
If you e.g. have a 300 DPI printer and setup the preview printer in InterformNG2 as if the printer is 150 DPI, then you will be able to see twice as much (in both directions) in the preview.
How to use the ZPL preview printer in the designer
In the designer you can now refer to the preview printers created above. You do that by first selecting ZPL as the preview type:
Then you can select which preview printer you want to use from this drop down list:
Now you can preview the ZPL result with this icon:
The result is displayed in a pop-up window like this:
Where the outer borders reflect the edge of the label.